Stuck In The Moment With You
by Anarchist278
Summary: Sometimes moving on from your first love is the hardest thing in the world! A short fic dealing with Karen's feelings towards Dan early in Season Four...


**STUCK IN THE MOMENT WITH YOU!!!**

**A.N Hi all this is just a little fic I wrote for a challenge on another board. Hope you all enjoy it and I would love to hear any feedback you might have!! A special thankyou to Christina for her beta-ing powers.**

Rolling over in bed, she fluffed up her pillow irritably. She had been lying there for well over an hour trying to escape into the oblivion of sleep but to no avail. Her mind was a whirling mass of confusion and nothing she did could calm her errant thoughts. His face floated into her mind again, and she almost screamed in frustration. She heard her son's movements down the hall and gritted her teeth once again as the urge to scream surged up within her.

She knew it was wrong to keep thinking about him like this. She was supposed to be in love with his brother, the brother who had died barely three months ago at the hands of a child with a gun. That was the day her world as she knew it had come crashing down. The life she had been so carefully constructing for herself had been torn away from her, and she was left with nothing but the shattered pieces of her heart.

Her hand drifted down to her almost flat stomach, only the tiniest of bumps giving evidence to the life growing inside of her. Although she hadn't known it at the time she had been left with something more. A small smile curved her lips at the thought of the child, his child. But almost as soon as the smile appeared it was chased away once more by the spectre of Dan floating tauntingly in the air in front of her.

Dan, the one person who in the naiveté of her youth she had believed she could love forever was also the one person who had managed to hurt her worse than she could ever have imagined possible, and he was still in her life. She had honestly believed for so long that she had been able to simply turn off all of the feelings she had once had for him, but she was now forced to admit that she had been fooling herself, those feelings had never really gone away. They had simply been simmering under the surface and she had learnt over the years to ignore them.

She had worked so hard to fool everyone else around her that she had eventually began buying into her own act. She'd masked her true feelings with facades of hate and disgust for what he had done to her and her son and eventually the act had become so second nature to her that she honestly believed that all of her love for him was gone. She had built up protective walls around her heart but the foundations had been weak, built upon the unsteady ground of her tumultuous emotions surrounding a man. A man who had been her first love, a man who had given her the child she loved more than anything in this world, a man who had let her down when she needed him the most.

Keith had never let her down in the way Dan had. Keith, had for the longest time, been the one constant in her life that she could rely upon but she had struggled to open herself up to him. She knew now that the reason for it was simple. He wasn't Dan and he never could be. To most people that would be a good thing, after everything Dan had done she should have welcomed the simplicity in the life Keith offered her but somehow it had never been enough.

When Keith had re-entered her life all those months ago she had been so happy to see him that she told herself that perhaps she was finally ready to give them the chance that she had so long denied them. She knew Keith loved her, and he could offer her a security that had been lacking from her life for so long. She was finally ready to admit to herself that she had been holding back all this time, still clinging to the ideal of her first love, but she was older now and it was time to let go of the silly fantasies of her youth and take what was being presented to her. What Keith was offering must be what it was to be in love as an adult. It may not have all the excitement and adrenaline of how it felt to be in love with Dan, but it was more solid, more grounded and surely that counted for something.

When Keith died she shut herself down. It hurt more then she could possibly imagine. She had lost her best friend and the man she had intended to spend the rest of her life with. It had taken everything she had inside of her to give herself over to Keith but she had done it telling herself that it was time for her to settle down and stop making excuses to herself for living half a life. Keith dying had not been part of that plan. Without him she was right back where she had started, alone.

When Dan started coming around she fought against it with everything inside of her knowing that to open herself up to him as she longed to do would be the ultimate act of betrayal to her love for Keith. But Dan kept coming, saying he would be there for her in the way she had longed for him to be there for her all those years ago when she was pregnant with Lucas and in the ensuing years. She hated him for it, telling herself it was too little too late but her heart betrayed her and refused to remain unaffected when he brought her the crib that he had rebuilt with his own hands. In the grand scheme of things, it was a small gesture really, but she couldn't deny that it touched something deep inside of her. She could no longer state with certainty that there was nothing there between them but it was Lucas who truly made her admit to it out loud that she had unresolved feelings where Dan was concerned.

He had never really asked her too much about her relationship with his father and for that she had been grateful because she never really knew what she would say if he ever did. But she had always suspected that the day would come when he would want to know something more. That didn't mean that she was prepared for it when it came though.

She had walked into his room chatting away about some inane topic and then BAM he had hit her with it.

"Hey Mom you loved Dan right, in high school?"

For the briefest of seconds a voice screamed out inside her head telling her not to answer, not to give away that piece of herself that she had kept locked up for so long but she pushed it back down and when she answered she was almost surprised that the calm voice actually came from her.

"Oddly yes!"

But what he said next shook her to her very core. It was one of those seemingly innocent questions that unlocked a Pandora's Box within her.

"Okay I know you probably can't answer this for me but what did you do when he didn't love you back? How did you get over it?"

The scariest part of it though was how easily the answer came to her mind. It was an answer that she had been trying to deny what seemed like forever and yet there it was so stark in her mind.

_She wasn't over it or him!_

"When I do, I'll get back to you!" she had answered him seemingly nonchalantly but those simple words had stirred up a maelstrom of emotions inside of her. She had walked out of the room, the sandwich she had brought him forgotten. With unhurried steps she went into the bathroom staring into the mirror at her own face reflected back at her. That simple truth that she had denied for so long was now out there floating around in the atmosphere almost choking her with its intensity. She wasn't over Dan and maybe she never would be!


End file.
